‘Awareness can help women fight violence’

PESHAWAR: Speakers at a function in the provincial capital on Saturday complained of widespread violence against women and called for better awareness of womenfolk for protection of their constitutional and legal rights.

Bytes for All (B4A), Pakistan, a human rights organisation, and Aware Girls, Peshawar, a women rights organisation, jointly organised the function under the ‘Take Back The Tech Campaign’, a campaign that connects the issue of violence against women and information and communications technology (ICT), to improve public awareness of violence against women and ways and means to fight it.

Civil society representatives, human rights activists, educationists, journalists and students showed up in large numbers. The main aim of the event was to create symbolic ‘Wall of Resistance’ by hand mapping to create public awareness of issues confronted by women and strategic use of ICTs by women and girls to combat violence against them in the society.

The event opened with an interactive session during which participants discussed all forms of gender-based violence, especially the one against women, and suggested ways and means to address it. They all expressed commitment to ending violence against women from the society.

The main highlight of the event was hand mapping on a large canvass by all participants, who mapped their hand impressions in different colours to create the ‘Wall of Resistance’, which will later be digitised and shared in the cyberspace via social media and international advocacy networks for awareness of violence against women.